Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should they pick something? I thought the whole point of this was to build open hardware and let me pick something? If you want a manufacturer to decide for you what you should run on your phone, maybe just buy a Samsung or apple device. They've already got it figured out also.
PINE64 hardware is not open hardware and it has never been marketed as such.
Why I left Pine64
121–130 of 227 posts
Re: Why I left Pine64
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Part of the success of the Raspberry Pi is that you can load whatever OS on it you want. Imagine if you could ONLY run Raspberry Pi OS! That’s not the issue with the Pine64 ecosystem, though. The direction they’ve chosen is actually similar to what Raspberry Pi has chosen: You can boot alternate OSes, but the primary focus is Raspberry Pi foundations own needs and everything else comes secondary. This is what it ta…
> The direction they’ve chosen is actually similar to what Raspberry Pi has chosen: You can boot alternate OSes, but the primary focus is Raspberry Pi foundations own needs and everything else comes secondary. If I put a SD card with ex. Alpine Linux into a pi, it'll boot into Alpine Linux. If I put a SD card with Alpine Linux into a Pinebook Pro, it'll boot into... Manjaro.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#123Re: Why I left Pine64
#124So now i know whom to blame for the fact that the camera app crashes 90% of the times before I manage to take a photo.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The direction they’ve chosen is actually similar to what Raspberry Pi has chosen: You can boot alternate OSes, but the primary focus is Raspberry Pi foundations own needs and everything else comes secondary. If I put a SD card with ex. Alpine Linux into a pi, it'll boot into Alpine Linux. If I put a SD card with Alpine Linux into a Pinebook Pro, it'll boot into... Manjaro.
I don't think the Raspberry Pi does UEFI boot by default? You'd have to put in a SD card with Raspberry Pi-specific boot support, including proprietary blobs.
EDIT: Actually I guess the Pi 4 added an onboard flash chip with an early bootloader, but I can't figure out if it impacts the boot order or changes how hard SD boot is: https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr...
Re: Why I left Pine64
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you’re trying to make a mass-market hardware product at bare-bones pricing, you have to be ruthless about simplifying the hardware and cutting costs. A single SPI chip isn’t a huge investment in absolute terms, but it adds one more sourcing complication (in the middle of a chip shortage) and creates significantly more RMA complexity (for the reasons that the Pine64 organization accurately explained from their pa…
> When you’re trying to make a mass-market hardware product at bare-bones pricing, you have to be ruthless about simplifying the hardware and cutting costs. But is that really what PINE64 should be trying to do? So far their support hasn't come from the "mass market". It's come from a niche market of open source hackers trying to build and support various Linux distros for mobile devices. Why does improving mass mark…
Re: Why I left Pine64
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
wow... I hadn't seen that before but the PinePower looks absolutely incredible
Having one, I don't feel as good about the PinePower. I bought it together with their Pinecil soldering iron (which is great!) as it seemed like the ideal way to provide power to it, but unfortunately it's a very unreliable combo, with the iron rebooting frequently. Discussion around many similar issue reports online suggests the possibility of bad implementations of USB PD. Perhaps this is more a criticism of the co…
Re: Why I left Pine64
#128Unless PINE64 changes course hard, I think this will be the moment they died, so to say. They may keep making SBCs etc alongside other vendors but the phones/tablets/laptops/watches/etc would continue being novelties and realistically majority e-waste. Really quite sad. If I'd name one single person in the FLOSS community who's done the most good for mobile open source, it'd be OP. Thank you so much for your service,…
Re: Why I left Pine64
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on what you were expecting. On their A64 Kickstarter they said the graphics capabilities are higher than the original XBox's level of performance. That might lead a person to expect it to play games well. The screenshot included a Netflix icon. The Kickstarter FAQ says it can play UHD 4K video. That might lead you to believe you could watch Netflix on it. As I understand it, the phone is based on the A64 b…
It can play 4k videos and it can play games, but expecting it to play 4k videos through an unoptimized browser with DRM and play virtualized games is extremely disingenuous.
Re: Why I left Pine64
#130Essentially everyone I know thinks of it as being Arch in a gimp suit. Some sort of rlysmart teenager's pet project rather than an actually serious tool for a million different reasons that most people can't even be bothered to get into.